A Test We Were Set Up to Fail: The Dissonance of Elite Recruitment
I am facing a dilemma.
Given that my long-term goal is the reconstruction of Ukraine, a country the United States has been an important partner to, do I apply for a job opportunity in China, its longstanding geopolitical adversary?
Last semester, I attended dozens of employer presentations, coffee chats, and "Down to Earth" sessions where senior leadership and SIPA alumni spoke of their experiences. These were employers with whom Columbia has an ongoing relationship. Most presentations followed a similar pattern: what they do, how many global offices they have, their headcount, and their strategic priorities. For those managing money, they highlighted their assets under management. The advice was always the same: monitor the website for job openings and enable notifications.
The speakers and the 50 students in the room were eager to discuss how to get a foot in the door to utilize their lived experiences and skills for the organization's mission. However, while students were deciding whom to trade their time to, the question of "how much"- the salary - was never brought up.
Rarely was a concrete pathway or specific contact person presented. Neither were the returns discussed: salary, organization-wide benefits, working culture, or career advancement opportunities. While salary varies by field, experience, and location, working culture is a more permanent, organization-wide concept.
I was confused by this dissonance. I thought that when an employer is invited to speak to students at an Ivy League institution where tuition is $100,000 a year, they would offer more than a repetition of their website’s "About Us" page. It feels like a game played in these large informational sessions; the employer stands in front of a room full of hopeful students and treats the talk like a learning exercise rather than a recruitment effort.
After dozens of nearly identical talks, I was no closer to understanding what opportunities existed for me. Despite studying at one of the top 50 universities globally - as defined by the British government’s High Potential Individual (HPI) visa, which offers a 2-year work permit to graduates of select institutions - I felt increasingly hopeless and unsure about how to land a job.
This indifference is rooted in a simple reality of supply. With 1.5 million people moving to the United States annually over the last decade, nearly half of whom arrive already holding advanced degrees, the local market is saturated with "expert labor." When such a vast reserve of highly skilled, multi-lingual, and educated talent is constantly replenished at your doorstep, the traditional rules of recruitment change. You no longer have to compete for talent or explain what they will get in return for spending their most productive, obligation-free years at your company. Instead, you can treat them as a surplus commodity, knowing that if one person asks about the salary or the culture, there are hundreds of thousands more waiting just to be noticed.
It took a single informational session with the Beijing-based multi-lateral development bank to understand why other campus speakers didn't try very hard to convince us their company was worth our time. The speaker provided a brief overview of the bank's mission and then quickly moved to graduate program specifics and employee benefits. He was specific about salary, monetary and administrative assistance for visas and relocation, vacation days, family leave, upskilling funds, and internal mobility policies.
The following day, I attended a session with a co-founder of a U.S.-based frontier-market private credit wealth manager. This speaker used no slide deck or organizational chart and mentioned no current openings. In fact, when asked, he admitted they had hired zero professionals in the United States in the past five years. When asked about the currency and salary range for their regional office in Georgia, he said, "It depends."
At the end of the chat, he rapidly announced the email address for the company’s recruiter, Mary, and left.
The room was filled with international students from the very frontier markets this firm serves. For many, English was their second, third, or fourth language. Trying to accurately write down a quickly spoken email address felt less like a recruitment effort and more like a test we were set up to fail.
I wasn’t just a student struggling with an email address; I was a data point in a growing trend of global talent hitting a geopolitical ceiling. Despite my experience, Ivy League education, and fluency in four languages, I discovered the local market treated me as a surplus commodity - easily replaceable because there were 1.5 million others right behind me.
